Resolution:
Beginning with EMS 8.1, most of the commands in the Administration tool and Admin APIs are unavailable when a server using a JSON configuration file is not in an active state. In such a situation, the only available commands are "show state", "shutdown" and "rotatelog". You should make the Admin connect to an active EMS server to perform most of the Admin work. If you are using GEMS and you want GEMS to always connect to the active EMS server, there is a property you can set in the gems.props file to enable this, called AutoReconnectToPrimary.